There’s a few YouTube channels that I think do a good job of being level-headed when it comes to analysing self-defense and giving decent advice around it. Hard2Hurt, Armchair Violence (a more general channel that recently did a video on unarmed knife defense), and Active Self Protection are three that come to mind right off the bat. All three say the same thing: • avoid sketchy locations if you can • pay attention to the people around you, especially in what are called “transition areas” like when you walk out of a store • deescalate conflict as much as possible (without giving in to demands) • leave as soon as you’re able • only fight when your hand is forced

As far as I’m aware, they all also advocate for carrying pepper spray and participating in folkstyle wrestling to use as your defensive base for things that don’t require lethal force. The problem is, you don’t have the only say on whether a situation will become a threat to your health and safety or not. Sometimes you’re just unlucky and a guy flips out on you for something petty and now you’ve got a guy pushing and shoving yelling about how he’s gonna fuck you up and you can see a pocket knife clipped in his pocket.

Most firearm uses are at very close range. If you practice your draw—and you absolutely fucking should—you should be able to draw and fire multiple rounds with a person busy punching or stabbing you. (Through what usually happens is the victim manages to get a window of separation and uses that to draw their weapon.) After a few shots your attacker will have had enough time to react to what you’re doing, but most people react to being shot in the gut by falling over. It’s mostly a psychological thing, but surprisingly effective. Once they do that, turn and run. All you’re trying to do is get them to stop hurting you so you can get away safely.

A genuine, actual answer is that when you’re being attacked, it is incredibly rare for a police officer to be standing there, ready to intervene. In life-or-death situations the police really only exist to take a report from whoever is left standing, and potentially make an arrest. There’s plenty of people out there who don’t have the strength to defend themselves in hand-to-hand combat, and even if they did, next to nobody has the skills necessary to reliably defend against a knife attack using their bare hands. That’s just plain how knife attacks work.

You can counter this with statistics that show that access to guns increases injuries and deaths, because they absolutely do, but pro-gun folks put the individual before the group on this issue. The individual, in their mind, should have the right to quick deadly force in order to facilitate defense of their own life, and other’s failure to handle that responsibility is not their problem and/or the price of that right.

There are always tradeoffs, in any policy you set for society. If you go the other direction there will be people who are victimized who would otherwise have been able to defend themselves. Which scenario is worse? How many victims of one type are worth victims of the other?

Potassium chloride is the other half. I mean, sure, if you need to limit your sodium intake, this is one way to do it, but maybe just put less salt in your food?

Good point.

Russia already stays far away from Ukrainian controlled Ukraine with their planes, because Ukraine has the ability to shoot them down. We could improve that ability, but they’re still not getting close to flying over land they don’t control.

They gave up pointless cruelty precisely because doing so cost them nothing.

SAME HERE BUDDY. AT MOST I’LL USE A LITTLE BAR SOAP OCCASIONALLY, BUT USUALLY ONLY ONCE A WEEK OR SO, AND EVEN THEN I USE IT SPARINGLY.

Oh for sure, but a Walmart board is going to frustrate you so much there’s a real risk you could quit when you’d stick it out with a “real” board. Like, if that’s all you got, that’s all you got. But if your just unwilling (not unable) to spend the extra $40, you’re making things unnecessarily hard on yourself.

I once bought some cheap harmonicas and after about. 10 minutes was like “yeah, these are total crap and won’t be any fun.” So I gave them away for free to someone who knew exactly what they were and bought a real one.

I’m in a similar boat. I spent a year researching the equipment in one of my hobbies and then dropped about $4k on gear. But the things I do simply wouldn’t be possible without the gear, physics is physics.

As long as you’re not working with a Walmart board it’s probably good enough.

Looks like they go for around $3000. That’s out of my price range.

That’s not how math works.

Seeing as how 40% of the security issues that have been found over the years wouldn’t exist in a memory-safe language, I would say a re-write is extremely worth it.

Recently I downloaded Chrome for some testing that I wanted to let separate from my Firefox browser. After a while I realized my computer was always getting hot every time I opened chrome. I took a look at the system monitor: chrome was using 30% of of my CPU power to play a single YouTube video in the background. What the fuck? I ended up switching the testing environment over the libreWolf and CPU load went down to only 10%.

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A practically guaranteed scenario, no doubt.

I mean, how many children get abused because people are too afraid to seek help? It’s not an area with an easy answer, and I don’t have hard numbers on how much harm either scenario would produce.

We really gotta flip the standard and make therapist sessions 100% confidential. We should encouraging people to seek help in stopping their bad behavior, no matter what it is, and they’re less likely to do that if they think a therapist could report them.

I literally said the solution in my first comment? Multi-member districts. Each district has, say, five representatives and they’re elected using some sort of proportional representation. Sequential Proportional Approval Voting is probably the best for the US. You can read up on the specifics of that method if you want, but in general any proportional method tries to take into account the fact that once a candidate gets into office, the people who voted for that candidate now have representation and some amount of satisfaction, so other people’s opinions should be more heavily weighted when awarding the next seat. It’s easiest to explain with party-based methods, but essentially, if the vote totals are 40% Team A, 40% Team B, and 20% Team C, then the winners should approximate that vote breakdown. In this case, 2:2:1. What it means is that minority populations are much more likely to have someone in office who faithfully represents them, but majority populations are still going to have the appropriate fraction of the seats in power.